Chongren Lien

Chongren Lien is the central figure of Chongbantu, the creation epic of the Naxi Dongba religion. He is regarded as the common ancestor of the Naxi, Tibetan, and Bai peoples.

Flood survivor.In the “Great Flood” chapter of the epic, Chongren Lien is the sole survivor of the inundated world. Hiding in a yak-hide sack bound with nine iron chains — three ends anchored to a cypress, three to a fir, three to a rock — he escapes death through his own will and the guidance of the gods.

Chongren Lien’s free will is first expressed through his selective obedience and disobedience to the gods.

The vertical-eyed goddess error. The sky god Dong Shenming explicitly warned him to marry the “horizontal-eyed, plain woman” in order to populate the world, but “at the first sight of a beauty, he forgot the god’s words and could not help but take up with the vertical-eyed goddess.” This “could not help it” is the impulse of free will — he chose beauty over utility, feeling over divine command.

Breaking the wood-effigy taboo. Dong Shenming fashioned nine wooden figures to repopulate humanity, warning him not to touch them for nine days. But Chongren Lien, “too lonely by himself, could not resist shaking hands and speaking with the effigies,” which caused the replication plan to fail. Once again, a “could not resist” reveals the life-impulse that cannot be fully bound by divine rule.

In the famous chapter “The Dangers of Heaven, The Ten Trials,” free will reaches its most dramatic expression. When Chongren Lien ascends to heaven to seek the hand of the heavenly woman Chen Heng Bao Bai Ming, the sky-father Zi Lao Apu obstructs him with trial after trial. He does not submit to divine authority; he dissolves each trial through wisdom, courage, and perseverance — crossing a ladder of blades, hunting the cliff-goat, milking the tigress — and finally wins the marriage. Scholars describe this as “the hero’s act of struggling with the sky-gods and with the evil gods.”

Unlike many creation myths in which humanity is passively expelled from an Eden, Chongren Lien choosesto descend from heaven to earth. He and his wife Chen Heng Bao Bai Ming “migrated down from the sky, along a silver ladder, clinging to a golden climbing rope, until they reached the sacred mountain Juna Shiluo.” This is a free decision — the choice of an earthly life and an independent space of survival.

Naxi myth does not picture creation as the flawless work of an omnipotent god. The “Nine Brothers of Heaven-Opening, Seven Sisters of Earth-Breaking” made a heaven that “hung down as if about to collapse” and an earth that was “uneven and rough.” But they “did not despair, and propped up the sky again with five pillars, and smoothed the earth.”

Chongren Lien inherits this spirit of creating in the midst of imperfection and rebuilding after failure — the very core of free will. Free will does not wait for perfect conditions; it acts inside an imperfect world.

Chongren Lien’s story is full of error and revision:

• Marrying the wrong goddess and producing a monstrous child → corrected by marrying the right one.
• Breaking the wood-effigy taboo and failing → finding a new partner.
• Children who cannot speak → resolved through the heaven-sacrifice ritual.

The implication is philosophical: free will is not a single correct choice, but a dynamic process of learning within error and developing within conflict.

In Mu Yuming’s Genealogy series of oil portraits of contemporary figures, Chongren Lien — the ancestor of individual will challenging an imperfect order — finds a deep resonance. Both are movements of development inside a two-directional struggle: following the inner voice, challenging the world, and rebuilding the relationship between the self and the world.

Chongren Lien holds the status of a “social charter” in Naxi culture. Chongbantuis regarded as the “mother text” of the Dongba scriptures, defining the social order of the Naxi people — family, kinship, marriage, ethics, and morality — and shaping their worldview, their values, and their view of life. He is an ancestor hero who bears both a human character and a divine one, called upon frequently in ritual.